This article is part of our Design special section About how food inspires designers to make and do surprising things.
In 2019, the artist Allan Wexler moved from the Manhattan Brownstone where he had lived with his wife and employee Ellen for 40 years. While packing, he discovered a black bicycle under the waste of a decades of conceptual art and design practice.
At the time, Mr. Wexler, who is now 76, was a new version of ‘investigated’The futuristic cookbook. “Published in 1932 by the futuristic Italian poet and theoreticist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, this collection of satirical recipes in rebellion against traditional Italian cuisine.
The book by Marinetti consisted of manifestos and news articles that he and others wrote to follow the campaign to bring about a revolution in the Italian dining in a time of rapid technological change.
Among the proposed meals was a dinner of black olives, fennel hearts and kumquats with a side of sandpaper, red silk and black velvet that the restaurant had to stroke with one hand while eating. Other sections called for meals in pills and powder form. Proposed locations for a good futuristic consumption include the cockpit of a Ford Trimotor plane.
In his career, Mr. Wexler has often returned to the objects and rituals of dining. He has shirts connected to a tablecloth for dinners so that they can literally put themselves in a meal and designed coffee cup Connected by tubes, where several imbibeers are needed to act together to take a sip. He manipulates artifacts to the point of absurdity, shakes the audience out of their routines and invites them to consider why they do what they do unthinkable.
For his own ‘Futurist Cookbook’, he and an employee, the Brooklyn designer Michael Yarinskyprovided Zany Diners who are being held around New York City, which would eventually be documented and presented in book form.
Last October the men set up the first dinner, ‘Tea with strangers“With a permanent installation, Mr. Wexler designed in 2006 for Hudson River Park.”Two too large tables“As that work is called, large, stainless steel table tops with parts that have been cut away, with Sitters creating themselves in configurations that invite interactions with each other.
The second dinner took place in February, with Mr. Wexler publicly consumed a meal in the Jane Lombard Gallery in Soho. Sitting with being “Light table(2021), whose lightbulb-input the top illuminated the glass table work in the surface, he helped himself to lower the chef Phoebe Tran through the chef Phoebe Tran. performance shed light on (and through) assumptions of normality granted to Western views on dining.
And the black bike?
It was the center of the third project in the ‘Bicycle for Picnicken’ series, performed last month in a forest of willow trees in Highland Park, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.
Mr. Wexler 19 black painted plywood boxes on the bike frame, each large enough for a specific part of a picnic, from a corkscrew to a cooler.
Filling the remaining boxes were interpretations of classic American picnic food – sandwiches, salted meat, crudités, a vanilla cake layered with rhubarb jam and rhubarb buttercream – prepared by Natasha PickowiczA pastry chef for the New York City restaurant Altro Paradiso.
The team brought a model, Aly N’DiayeTo be the picnic. Everything dressed in black, he walked the bike a hill in a hollow.
Employees who clean up the mess that lags behind by Easter celebrations looked at Mr. N’Diaye the required red-checked picnic blanket, Tupperware containers, kitchen utensils and a bottle of wine.
“It’s incredibly fun, the discovery of what’s in every box,” said Mrs. Pickowicz, saw how food and tools came forward. “The act of food must be joyful and exploratory.”
Mr. Wexler’s idea was to dismantle the components of an experience – the picnic – such as someone who gets a car engine to find out how it works.
“It lets us look carefully at everyday phenomena,” the artist said, adjusting the windshield/table that turned up and down from the steering wheel. “It changes the everyday in theater.”
While he directed the action, Mr. Yarinsky noted: “These are performances of ways in which people can live, but generally not.”
The men compared “bike for picnic” with the movable parties and large picnics of the Victorian era, but undressed to meet the do-it-yourself ethos associated with bicycles and multiplex boxes. In contrast to the valued automation and speed Marinetti, the superior, discreet components were intended to encourage picnic players to slow down and think about the various aspects of an informal and often spontaneous meal.
Nowadays, the future that the futurists had dreamed of, with its synthetic food and technological processes – although perhaps not the way that Marinetti had been presented, who was an early proponent of the fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini.
World economies have developed around complex cooling systems, transport, genetic modification and a whole series of other technologies. People can eat meals on foot or alone in their car.
“Now it is possible not to think about food, for many of us,” said Nicola Twilley, who recently published “Frostbite: how cooling our food, our planet and ourselves has changed. “” And I think that is a mistake, because it is our most intimate relationship with the planet, short of breathing. “
In contrast to ‘The Futurist Cookbook’, Mr. Wexler and Mr. Yarinsky with his tirades against traditionalism and pasta, Mr Yarinsky’s project offers many ways to think about dining. Their alternative vision for the future is not tight: it is friendly, smart and full of artistic intention.
Subsequently, the couple plan to attach acoustic horns, similar to those on a gramophone, to a table, so that the usually hidden source of sound that creates atmosphere becomes visible during a meal.
“It is a new ‘futuristic cookbook’, an inversion of the original,” said Mr. Wexler of his arrival. “We are talking about democracy, a humanistic future.”
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